I followed this case for a while, and after reading "Finding Me" by Michelle Knight, one of the girls who was held captive all those years, I can't help but wonder how many other missing people are still alive and being held captive?
I wonder about that too. I used to think it unlikely, but then came the Jaycee Lee and Ariel Castro case and now it does not seem far-fetched. And think of this too: if Nathaniel Kibby had not let AH go, she could still be there with him indefinitely. What about Elizabeth Smart? It was her father who put Mitchell's name out there as the man who took her.
He solved the crime, not the police. The police did not want him to go to America's Most Wanted. Another one is Shawn Hornbeck. He decided to leave one day after his kidnapper got another kid. Would he still be there had that not happened? So let's break this down for a moment:
Castro's women escaped on their own.
AH was just let go.
Shawn Hornbeck escaped on his own.
Elizabeth Smart was recovered but it had absolutely nothing to do with any police work.
The only person who was recovered due to police work was Jaycee Lee Duggard, and even that was really just pure dumb luck and was not the work of a cop who was investigating her case.
All this tells us a few things. First of all, kidnapped people who are still alive are very close by to where they were last seen, likely within 100 miles at the most. Kidnapped people who are still alive will never be found through police work. The police are terrible at this. Look at AH.
The man who kidnapped her drove that same route every day home from work at the same time the kids got out of school and went behind Mount Washington (where her cell last pinged) on his way home and still LE steadfastly refused to study who drove that route at that time and investigate them. Again, it was just pure dumb luck that he let her go. I am not doing this to "bash" LE; I am pointing this out purely as a fact that must be taken into consideration when we sleuth these cases. The police simply do not have the skills or talent to solve these crimes. Both Gina Dejesus and Amanda Berry were linked to Ariel Castro, and the cops never even once interviewed him. Okay so that's that. I can give countless examples as to how LE messed up in every single last one of these cases (the worst being Jaycee Lee Duggard) but it would take up too much space here. The point is simply that one of these cases where the person is still alive will never, ever be solved by police work.
Some other things: very often when it is children who are kidnapped, they are out in the open within a year, and have access to the internet, to phones, and to other people. It takes almost no time at all to turn a child into an obedient victim. This means that LE needs to take a different approach after this amount of time has passed and start making direct appeals to the child. These appeals will have to be carefully phrased and crafted in a way so as not to spook the perp, but it can still be done. Shawn Hornbeck actually went on the website his family set up and asked them if they would want him back, and he even used the name Shawn! Parents just assume their child knows they want them back, but the kidnapper has caused so much damage at this point, that it is important for the family to constantly remind their child of this.
Think of Maura's case for a moment here. You know that creepy guy who posts the youtube videos? Well, police have cleared him as a suspect, but have they actually searched his home? No, of course not. They just went and talked to him. I am not saying that means this guy is not just some loser desperate for attention, but I would not put a single smidgen of credibility into the police work on these cases. I do not think that the police are bad or stupid or incompetent; they simply do not have the skills needed to really find kidnapped people. The fact that people were eliminated by police as having nothing to do with Maura's disappearance means absolutely nothing to me. We know from the AH case that police do not do what I would consider to be extremely basic, namely setting up surveillance and seeing who regularly drives that route at the time the person was taken. They did not think Mitchell was a good suspect even though he had once worked at the Smart home and had a history of trying to recruit "wives" in downtown Salt Lake. Even though Garrido had already once kidnapped and raped a woman, police saw zero reason to actually enter his home and scope it out in the 20 years he was on parole. He told them everything was fine, and since he said so, that was good enough for them!
Look, I know it is not politic here to "bash" LE, and that is not what I am trying to do. What I am hoping we can learn from this is that LE simply does not have the necessary resources to deal with these cases and solve them. I think it is in part where so much frustration on the part of the families stems from. They know that LE will never solve the case because it is apparent that police methods will never work in these cases. This is certainly one reason why it depresses me that LE insists on holding back key information. I understand
their reasoning behind it - they think they will need it to solve the case someday. The problem with that is that they will never solve the case, so it makes little sense to me to not release it to the public. Take AH for example. They refused to say where the letter was mailed from. Well, based upon what we now know, the letter must have been postmarked locally. See, people were thinking that AH could be anywhere in the world, but really she was very close by. Had people known that, then I am sure that Nathaniel Kibby's name would have been on a list as a possible suspect.
These cases are simply far too difficult for law enforcement to solve on their own and sadly LE is not self-aware enough to understand that. They can keep key information to themselves, but it will go absolutely nowhere in solving the case.